Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

On their way back to Farwell’s, by accident they’d rousted a girl of fourteen or fifteen from under one of the banks of Battle Creek. Likely she’d been fetching water when the fight started and ducked into hiding there. The Englishman’s boy watched her stumble by, wrists bound in a rawhide rope lashed to the horn of Hardwick’s saddle. “Looky at the young hen we caught,” Hardwick sang out to him.

“What the hell you want with her?” the Englishman’s boy had said in a bitter voice. He was grieved by Hardwick’s not having lifted his hat to Grace’s corpse, like he should have by all rights.

“Hostage,” was all Hardwick offered, and kept on pulling her towards the fort while she fought like a calf being dragged to the branding.

I wait by the ruined windmill as he approaches. Wylie in his big white new hat, riding a big white old horse, the low-slung sun blazing behind him. The horse comes on at a tottery trot, flailing the dust with his hooves, rolling onward like an overloaded ship in breakers. Wylie reins him in, sits scowling down at me.

“Morning,” I say.

“What you want?” Eyes sullen and heavy and hostile, a belligerent tuck to each corner of the mouth.

“Shorty isn’t in the bunkhouse. Do you know where he is? I’d like to talk to him.”

“Maybe he don’t want to talk to you. Go away.”

“Maybe he does. Maybe it’s his decision.”

The horse is a very old horse. His eyes are a blank, stony pink; the nose bristles like a porcupine, thick with stiff white hair. The yellow teeth grind the bit despairingly while a grass-green slobber bubbles over the lips. The legs are scarred; the hooves cracked, broken, spreading, pie-plates of horn.

“You leave Shorty alone. You made him enough trouble.”

“Where’d the horse come from, Wylie?”

The question distracts him. He thinks before answering. “Shorty ain’t too restful lately. Many a times he leaves his bunk and goes to night-walking – he won’t let me go along. I says he’s going to founder in the dark and break a leg but he don’t listen. Three mornings in a row he comes back and says he seen a horse a-wandering up and down the roads. It don’t sound likely. I never seen no horse by day. Then, first light, one morning he comes along a-leading this here old horse. Somebody turned him loose, Shorty says. Don’t want to pay his feed bill.”

“I didn’t come to make Shorty trouble,” I say. “I just came to see how he is.”

Wylie shifts in the saddle. The old horse stands like a statue. Wylie casts his eyes anxiously toward the horizon like a man seeking the exit of a burning theatre.

“Where is he, Wylie?”

“He got enough trouble without you,” says Wylie. “Shorty boughten himself a new black suit. Every day he puts it on and goes to say his say. Alls he wants is a word. But they don’t let him get close to that man. ‘Move along,’ they say. Shorty says, ‘They making a pitcher on me. I got a right.’ ‘Yeah and I’m the Queen of Siam, look at my yeller tits,’ they says and shoves him on. I put a poke in that feller’s eye when he said that and now Shorty says I can’t come along no more. Keep to home, he says. I’m a-keeping but it ain’t proper what they doing to him. Old Shorty standing outside that gate in his boughten suit waiting for that man.”

“Listen, Wylie,” I say, “there’s nobody for Shorty to see. They’re away shooting the picture. On location. There’s nothing he can do now. It’s finished. You tell Shorty that. You tell him it’s gone too far to stop. Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. There’s no changing it now.”

“He’s sitting on the step of a morning, dogged out. I say, ‘You got to go night-travelling, ride that horse, Shorty, hold to your strength for waiting by that gate.’ But Shorty he won’t ride this horse.”

“Ask Shorty to take you to Canada. Tell him you want to go.”

“You ain’t getting rid of us that easy,” says Wylie. His face is a hard white plaster splendour. “Somebody got to talk to him. He’s Shorty McAdoo.”

Farnum has stopped buying my scripts. He says I’ve lost my way, that it isn’t up to him to support a sermon-writer. For weeks my savings have been going to pay my mother’s bills at the Mount of Olives Rest Home. I have to stoop to taking work as an extra. It’s a few dollars and the studios supply a boxed lunch. Then I get a job on a picture about the French Revolution that almost qualifies as acting. A revolution requires mobs of the convincingly crushed and downtrodden and my lameness makes me a natural for a sans-culotte. I am to make my film debut as the crippled beggar André. André has to beg alms from a sneering, effeminate aristocrat who thrusts him into a puddle with his gilded cane. Then comes my big moment, a close-up of my mucky face passing from bewilderment to injured pride, to homicidal rage. This, the director has confided, is a critical moment in the picture, the moment I become a symbol , the moment I become the embodiment of the French people awakening to the dream of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.

When I get out of bed at four o’clock the morning of my debut, I don’t feel at all well. In costuming and make-up the feeling grows worse. The girl rubbing grime into my face remarks how hot I am. I am, and then again I’m not. One second my scanty beggar’s rags are as stifling as a winter overcoat and the next I am shivering and my teeth are chattering. My legs ache. The scene is to be filmed at dawn, on a set with a cobbled street and a Parisian tavern. After standing for an hour waiting for props to deliver the aristocrat’s coach my bones feel tender and bruised. A slow stain of misery seeps through me; something is putting brutal thumbs to the back of my eyeballs.

I get the call, the coach has arrived. I wade through harsh, raucous light which skids off the papier-mâché tiles of the tavern roof and into my aching eyes. The director booms at me through a megaphone, the coach lurches around the corner and brakes dramatically at the tavern door. When I hold out my hand and cry for alms, I can feel fingernails scraping my throat.

At a touch of the cane I topple. Acting is not required. However, I collapse on my back, not my face. Somebody drags me to my feet as the director barks for another take. The coach circles the set and rattles at me again, four horses, four madly spinning wheels. The tip of the cane thuds into my chest; I reel down into cold, glutinous muck. But I’ve forgotten my close-up. The director rages through his megaphone. Where is bewilderment? Where is wounded pride? Where is the righteous rage of the dispossessed?

We do it again. We do it four more times. And each time is a greater failure than the last.

Someone takes me back to costuming and strips the soaked and filthy rags from my body. Somebody else climbs into them and rushes out the door and into my part while I sit on a chair naked, shivering. People bustle in and out of the room, the noise makes my head hurt. At last, I order my legs to stand and begin to put on my street clothes. With one hand I steady myself against the wall while the other painfully fumbles with buttons. I don’t try to tie my shoes, just shuffle out, laces dragging.

I board a streetcar. At first I hear people whispering all around me, even though the car is nearly empty, then I realize it is the hissing of the tramlines overhead. I’ve never been so tired in my life. I keep dozing off and waking, disoriented, whenever the streetcar bangs to a stop. The people boarding move in slow motion, sway sickeningly up the aisle. In my desperation to get home I have to stop myself from shouting, “Get a move on!” Watching them lurch unsteadily up the aisle, the hot California sunshine pressing against the glass of the windows, I am on the verge of puking at my feet.